Privacy company hacked

Privacy of just about 200,000 people was compromised after Digital River, an E-commerce company, was attacked by a vicious criminal. The assault resulted to unlawful display of data owned by quite a number of individuals. Based on the recent news broadcasts, the attack was made possible after the crook’s activation of a rarely-used search command on the protected servers of the company during the month of January.

Rights of many people were violated

Unfortunately, about 198,398 people were affected by this attack and the kinds of data that were revealed included the individuals’ names, websites, e-mail addresses, and their special user-identification numbers. These pieces of information were primarily collected by various marketing corporations and these groups utilized the software manufactured by Direct Response Technologies, a minor division in Digital River. And then, all the accumulated data were kept safe in the password-protected servers of the company.

High value was set for the prohibited trade

On the latest news from “The Minneapolis Star-Tribune”, the violation in the individuals’ rights were only discovered when a certain man, nineteen years of age and a resident of the city of New York, attempted to trade the stolen data for over 500,000 US dollars.

The New Yorker Eric Porat tried selling the data that he had on hand to Digital River’s equivalent company, Media breakaway. In response to this, they immediately warned the hacked E-commerce company about the illegal trade being offered to them.

Greatest bidder will earn the prize

It was said that he was willing to sell all the gathered data to the company who would propose the highest value of money. Porat informed Media Breakaway’s CEO that the bits of information that he was storing were given to him by the previous consultant of the company Digital River. According to the 19-year-old’s statement, the confidential data were tapped during the time when the security systems were weakened due to the temporary shutdown of the servers of the Digital River.

And, as of the latest, a federal grand jury is on the process of looking into the incident and FBI is there in case they needed assistance.